Removable Disk Backup

[Liberto29]

Hi -

 

Our tape system has seen better days and I need to replace it by year end. Our reseller recommended an LTO drive from HP and a removable disk backup system from Idealstor.

 

Has anyone hear backed up to a system like this before? (Teralyte Removable Disk Backup). It look like the capacity/speed is what I need but I am not familiar with them. We are an HP shop but it appears that they don't make something like this.

 

Any feedback or potential gotcha's are appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Lib

[ICT_GUY]

How much data is invloved?

 

USB Sticks are getting very cheap, 32 gigs will be £20 next year. Otherwise think about USB HD's they can be very cheap, fast, and the 2.5" ones are fairly tough as they are Laptop HD's.

[Liberto29]

Wow! Thanks for the fast response.

 

We have about 800GB of data and it is growing. The system we are looking at has a native capacity of 1.5TB per drive bay. Uses SATA2 disks.

 

I have tried the USB route. The only issue with USB is that transfer rates our pretty slow for our amount of data and when using numerous USB drives Windows would assign random drive letters which caused us to have to tweak things when we put a new one in.

 

We want a solution that we can schedule our backup jobs and only have to deal with our media when we need to put a new one in or send something offsite.

 

Thanks!

[ChrisH]

Your probably going to need a Disk to Disk to tape system if you are shifting a lot of data. The backups would go to some kind of Disk device overnight where the transfer speed will be very good, then during the day you can transfer this to a tape autoloader.

[sammy]

Your probably going to need a Disk to Disk to tape system if you are shifting a lot of data. The backups would go to some kind of Disk device overnight where the transfer speed will be very good, then during the day you can transfer this to a tape autoloader.

 

I agree this seems the best way, if your a HP shop then use something like a HP D2D100 Backup System , and you can choose a model which includes the appropriate sized LTO tape drive so that you can have the best of both worlds.

 

The TeraLyte looks good, but your relying on carrying around cheaper SATA disks which are not really designed to be mobile devices. Also, you are putting your backups on a device which is not HP, and although this is not a problem in terms of branding, it may be if your not sure of the warranty "reliability" of the Teralyte.

 

Personally i would stick with a tried and tested HP LTO solution for the offsite backups.

[dhicks]

Any feedback or potential gotcha's are appreciated.

 

I have a RAID-1 box at home - a simple external (eSATA connected) box with a couple of mirrored harddrives in. The attached computer just sees a standard disk, anything written to it gets written to both disks. You can yank one disk out whilst in use (I've tried - mine kept playing video as I removed a disk!) and swap in another. Mine was £150 or so from eBay, although that particular seller is no longer around. You have to pay separately for disks, of course - just get 3 or 4 1TB disks and keep swapping them around. That way you have a backup that's always available (it's plugged right in to a computer, ready for you to start restoring files) and you get an identicle copy to put in a fireproof safe somewhere. My only problem is the fan noise is a bit much for a home system, but that's not much of a consideration for work.

 

--

David Hicks

[sammy]

I do like that idea David, simple and cheap, and exactly what i used to do for taking complete copies of server RAID sets.....I like.

 

looks like the techies are awake and working well into the night

[soapyfish]

I am in a similar position, I have a total server capacity of 3.4 TB about 50% is in use but the capacity of the backup tapes a mixture of LTO, AIT4, and DLT and now nearly full. The backup and verify is taking me nearly 12+ hours on some of the servers.

 

I have been looking at some Tandberg data devices such as this

http://www.tandbergdata.com/emea/en/products/automation/storageloader-lto/

 

The problem I have is that the fastest devices needs local Scsi or FC-AL connections which means having some kind of hardware between the device and the 8 servers.

Its something I am looking into at the moment so I will post more info as I find it.

 

My other problem is that the school would prefer a full offsite backup daily which the most problamatic part of the job.

 

Edited December 16, 2008 by soapyfish

[sammy]

I am in a similar position, I have a total server capacity of 3.4 TB about 50% is in use but the capacity of the backup tapes a mixture of LTO, AIT4, and DLT and now nearly full. The backup and verify is taking me nearly 12+ hours on some of the servers.

 

I have been looking at some Tandberg data devices such as this

Tandberg Data: StorageLoader LTO

 

Hi,

 

if your looking at the autoloader route, then you should take a peek at these, HP MSL2024 1 LTO-4 Ultr 1760 SAS Library, native they will backup 19.2Tb using upto 24 LTO tapes in the autoloader, giving you about 288Gb Per hour native or 576Gb per hour compressed. I have a few clients with these devices and they are reliable and very good.

 

The Tandberg is also a very good device, and i have some clients who have chosen to go that route, my only quibble or word of advice there normally is that the warranty centres for tandberg are in Europe which means that under a warranty recall scenario you have to wait for tape drives to be shipped back and forth, not the following day response you get with HP. I only advise this becuase in the past i have been in that warranty scenario...

[soapyfish]

Thats worth knowing thanks. do you have any idears about the 8 servers to 1 device problem ?

[sammy]

sorry im not sure what your issue is, are you backing up 8 servers over the LAN to 1 device, or are you thinking of using a Fiber based tape autoloader device which would mean having a fiber card in each server and then fiber switch ?

 

can you please clarify ?

[button_ripple]

Might not be what you looking for, but can I recommend online backup??

 

We are currently trialling software from Gigasoft. They will do loads of different packages for you!! They take all of your data away on a portable drive, then set your servers to backup, and they do an incremental backup whenever you like!!

 

Website is: http://www.gigasoftdatabackup.com/

 

I was against online backup, but this is fantastic!

Edited December 16, 2008 by button_ripple

[soapyfish]

I would be needing to upload from 8 servers to this one device but the tandberg device connects locally via scsi. It would need 8GB connections to keep up with them or some kind of fibre connectivity maybe ? I am not very up on fibre connections really :-(

 

I did look at online storage breifly but so far I have not sound a company that will take the ammounts of data I am talking about but I did not try Gigasoft

 

Also thats a GREAT avatar ! button_ripple

Edited December 16, 2008 by soapyfish

[sammy]

I would be needing to upload from 8 servers to this one device but the tandberg device connects locally via scsi. It would need 8GB connections to keep up with them or some kind of fibre connectivity maybe ? I am not very up on fibre connections really :-(

 

Normally the way to do it is to connect the autoloader to one server using either a SAS/SCSI or Fiber connection. Then use remote agents (on SYmanctec Backup Exec ) on all the other servers to backup across the network. To negate any possible implications of network congestion you can install a cheap additional Gigabit NIC into each of the 8 servers and dedicate all the backup traffic across that NIC, therefore allowing you to backup during the daytime if need be. That has proven to be a fast and reliable method for a few of my clients.

[soapyfish]

That sounds like it might work I will have a look in to that !

[dhicks]

I would be needing to upload from 8 servers to this one device but the tandberg device connects locally via scsi. It would need 8GB connections to keep up with them or some kind of fibre connectivity maybe?

 

You might be thinking about the wrong way - do you actually need to shift your entire server contents accross your network every day? You could just copy the files / data that have changed to your central backup disk, which will probably be a few tens of GB at the most in a day. You can then take copies from that central backup at your leisure - again, tape-based backup software will let you do differential backups instead of needing you to copy 8TB at a time to tapes.

 

--

David Hicks

[soapyfish]

I have considered that but the school has before been stung by incemental backups where the previous tapes where corrupted and vast ammounts of data was lost. thats the main reason they are looking for full offsite daily backup. its a political / technical problem really

[Liberto29]

I agree this seems the best way, if your a HP shop then use something like a HP D2D100 Backup System , and you can choose a model which includes the appropriate sized LTO tape drive so that you can have the best of both worlds.

 

The TeraLyte looks good, but your relying on carrying around cheaper SATA disks which are not really designed to be mobile devices. Also, you are putting your backups on a device which is not HP, and although this is not a problem in terms of branding, it may be if your not sure of the warranty "reliability" of the Teralyte.

 

Personally i would stick with a tried and tested HP LTO solution for the offsite backups.

 

Thanks for the feedback and good suggestions. We saw a web demo of the Teralyte yesterday and I feel that is the direction we are leaning. The problem with using disk and tape is we have to now buy 2 different systems to basically backup the same data. This removable SATA system basically does both and gives us added capacity to boot.

 

We looked into the loader option but because we found we had to replace our tapes here and there, the actual cost of disk is about the same.

 

Thanks again for the help!

 

Lib

[torledo]

That sounds like it might work I will have a look in to that !

 

The only problem with streaming direct to tape via a backup media server attached to an autloader, is that your either having to multiplex all these backup streams from several servers onto a single tape using a single tape drive or your sending each backup job to a seperate tape...and the loader then has to load tapes sequentially, both options take up considerable time. Having an autloader with two tape drives could alleviate this bottleneck but you are talking about considerable expense, especially if you go FC. Also, it sounds to me as if your not at the FC stage yet.

 

Much better when backing up several severs is to look to stream to disk, and then offload or cache directly to tape for your offsites. Most commercial backup apps give you the option of using disk as the backup media. And the disk in question can be as simple as a server with a RAID5 local disks.

 

How you then get that to tape, or whether you go full or incremental is up to you to decide based on what the manual says and on what other organisations are doing with small D2D2T implementations.....I seriously don't like the idea of these removable disk options. They just look so naff. And i don't see the advantage of replacing tape with removable disk for the offsite option.....surely the advantage in disk is have a random access device protected by RAID fault tolerance that you can write to and restore from with a few clicks in no time at all......tape then becomes the thing you never need to touch or worry about unless a catastrophe befalls your data at the primary site. What possible advantage have you got with disk as the offsite media, surely the advantage is in having a storage array or storage server as the disk in D2D.

[Midget]

Arise dead thread.

 

Soapyfish - did you find a solution in the end? I'm attempting to do the same. full backups (mainly databases) from 8 servers.

[bandgeekmafia78]

I'm also looking at buying the Tandberg StorageLoader LTO-4. Does anyone currently use this hardware and can confirm that its a good piece of kit?

 

ta.